Glacier Monitoring & Dynamics
Glaciers are excellent indicators of climate change as they respond quickly to changes in air temperature and precipitation. Due to their vast size, ice sheets respond slower to climate change but their growth or decline strongly controls global sea level.
We develop innovative measuring approaches to understand what drives glacier changes and ice sheet mass balance. Thereby we often combine in situ and remote sensing data. We use our measurements to design a variety of modelling approaches to assess the response of glaciers and ice sheets in a changing climate.
We presently focus on measuring glacier mass change at local to regional scales, global-scale projections of sea level rise, a better representation of snowfall on glaciers and on the hydrology of meltwater as it travels along the surface of glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet.